Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found

by Marie Brenner

Book Overview

A TOP TEN FAVORITE BOOK OF THE YEAR--MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES

A ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH BEST MEMOIR OF THE YEAR

INCLUDES AN AUTHOR INTERVIEW WITH LESLEY STAHL

Marie Brenner's extraordinary memoir of sibling rivalry asks a universal question: How can two people from the same family turn out so entirely different? Brenner's brother, Carl, lives in the apple country of Washington...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312428804
• ISBN13: 9780312428808
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Got a sibling?

What a remarkable read. Families are always complicated and sometimes wonderous and Marie Brenner has seen it, felt it and shares it all. I can't wait to get into bed each night to treat myself to a few more chapters. I'll hate to see the last page coming.

The best summer read ..or for any season.

While her journalism has always been great, this memoir is a small masterpiece, must reading for anyone who has a sibling, or doesn't. Thanks to Marie Brenner, Carl Brenner will not die. He becomes an unforgettable character. So does she. Sensitive, witty, poignant, absolutely elegant. I cannot recommend the book too highly.

When siblings just can't get along

This is writer Marie Brenner's intimate memoir about her brother and their incredibly complex and fraught relationship. I find myself overwhelmed with admiration for Ms Brenner, not only for accomplishing the sheer task of getting this book down, laden as it is with generations of family history and scientific and psychological research, but also for the intense struggle she documents as she attempted to forge some kind of common ground, an essential connection, with her very strange sibling. As the title suggests, Ms Brenner and her brother, Carl, are not at all alike. Chalk and cheese, in fact. She's an investigative journalist, highly intelligent, happy and successful. He is similarly smart and successful, but also anal and controlling, a cold fish who sends his sister a tray of fruit from his orchards every year with a note that says: 'I picked them myself. Don't give them away.' A right-wing lawyer from Texas who has in his mid-life moved into growing apples in a big way in Washington State, he has always kept his younger, more lefty, liberal-intellectual sister at more than arm's length. It seems he has no love for her, and his attitude towards her and her smart, New York life is obnoxious and condescending. And really weird. 'You always have to show off and tell us what you know, Carl said.' Anyone of us in the same boat, faced with such a dour character and such direct put-downs, would be forgiven for turning our back on him. Yet she doesn't cast him off as a bad egg or a black sheep, but instead, when she discovers he has cancer, she puts her life on hold and moves across the country to go into bat for him, hoping to find a way to save his life, and also to spend their last few months together and fix what ails them both. It must be said that she probably does this as much for herself: in many ways her opinion of herself seems coloured a little by this blighted relationship: 'Why can't I just be easy with my brother, the way I am with my friends? That we are not close seems a badge of shame, a personal failure, a mark of my inabilities, bossy nature, and tendency to exaggerate. Carl thinks of me as the human flaw. 'I'm going to give you a quiz. 'This is how Carl starts many of our conversations. 'I wish I were kidding.' Since she is a journalist as well as an author, she digs deep to get to the bottom of what ails them. 'A research study on siblings breaks down the percentages: 52 percent of all brothers and sisters have a close relationship, 12 percent have no relationship, and 21 percent are something called "borderline." I am a borderline, defined by and against my brother, locked into some ancient and immutable feud. There is a moat around our conversations. Why? Why did we spend years locked in struggle with each other? I had to believe there was a chance that some of the answers could be found in the past, in letters and facts and research, in new interpretations of patterns held up to the light. I was opera

Uncomfortable Truths about Sibling Rivalry

In life, there are always people we don't get along with or find hard to understand, but what happens when the person who is hardest to befriend is your own brother? The relationship between siblings lies at the center of "Apples & Oranges." When, in Marie Brenner's case, sibling rivalry is a fundamental part of the brother-sister dynamic, is it possible to change that familial relationship? Even when the situation is desperate? "Apples & Oranges" chronicles the story of Marie and her brother Carl (as well as other interesting members of the Brenner clan), a relationship that has been contentious almost from birth...or at least dating back to Carl, age 3, throwing his baby sister out the window. Fast forward to adulthood, where the separation of siblings is not only geographical, but entrenched by their vastly different personalities; Carl is a conservative apple grower, living in Washington state, while Marie, a classic New York liberal, makes a living as an investigative journalist for "Vanity Fair." Their worlds could not be more different, so too, their personalities. As adult siblings, every encounter remains strained. When Carl sends precious fruit from his orchards as a gift to Marie, it comes complete with instructions and follow-up phone calls. Even Carl's decision to share his life-altering secret (a terminal disease) is done by letter to Marie delivered via FedEx and scheduled to arrive after the Thanksgiving holiday. In turn, when Marie decides to fly out to Washington upon learning the news, Carl is not informed ahead of time for fear of sibling rejection. With such a long way to go, is it possible for two individuals so separate in their philosophies and life styles to come together as family in the face of this crisis? For Marie, it is the only solution. While she can't save her brother's life (despite all her investigative skills--in this case, applied to medical research to save her brother), Marie believes that if she and her brother can somehow bridge the gap that has existed for so many years, it will be enough. The journey to that place of understanding is the essence of this book, and Brenner has used her unsparing journalistic eye (even on her own behavior) to tell a story that is gripping. For anyone who has ever been frustrated with a sibling, the raw emotion set on the page here will resonate. It's the pebble in the shoe that we live with in our relationships, it's the way of thinking that just seems impossible to understand, it's the human frailty that makes us all the imperfect people that we are. Christine Zibas, Book Pleasures

Marie tells her story with grace, humor and a rare frankness

All her life, Marie Brenner struggled to understand her older brother, Carl. They had very little in common: Carl was a one-time lawyer turned apple farmer in Washington State; Marie was an investigative journalist in New York City, espousing every cultural and political position Carl professed to hate. He was aloof and patronizing, his put-downs cruel and constant; she was never allowed to forget that she did not impress him. How could she break through? All she wanted was a loving, solid relationship with her only sibling. To accomplish this, she read everything she could find on sibling relationships and entered psychotherapy herself. But Carl remained Carl, unwavering in his unpleasantness, the man who went so far as to go to a performance of Wagner's "The Ring Cycle" rather than attend his only sister's wedding. Then Carl was struck with a cancer called adenocarcinoma, which has a survival rate of only 11%. Sure that this would be their chance to bond, their last chance, Marie dropped everything in New York and moved to Washington to be with her brother. He accepted her help, in his own way, as she researched treatment regimens and clinical trials, and learned everything there is to know about apple orchards. Marie also researched their family and uncovered a wealth of genealogical research. While this did not interest Carl, readers will be interested to learn that Marie's aunt, Anita Brenner, was also a writer, an art critic who was integral to bringing Mexican art to prominence in the 1930s. No matter how successful she was in her career, her older brother, Marie and Carl's father, never approved of her. His letters to his sister have exactly the same negative tones of judgment and disapproval as Carl's letters to Marie. Are Carl and Marie this generation's version of an argument that has always been in their family? Are their feuds learned behavior? How do they break the chain? Carl's emotional difficulties and obsessive work led me to wonder if he had Asperger syndrome. The author doesn't say. He treated his cancer in his own way, going to China and immersing himself in alternative medicine. Carl and Marie grew closer, but not close enough. She couldn't predict what would happen when he ran out of new therapies, and he never told her what he was going to do, his last act of insensitivity. Marie tells her story with grace, humor and a rare frankness. She is not afraid to share with readers Carl's complaints about her --- desperate to impress, overly dramatic --- and he has a point. There is one photograph of Carl and Marie as children. Marie writes, "He is barely six years old and has already developed the Carl Look." I didn't see any particular look --- just a mildly uncomfortable boy who was nothing like his sister. In the same picture, Marie is smiling and shouting, her energy unmistakable. It's that energy that comes across in APPLES & ORANGES --- the work she puts into their relationship, the struggle to understand, and the n